A wise and moving study of the middle-aged fear of loneliness
Beginning National’s Dorfman Theatre ★★★★★
‘Silence and withdrawal all round,” John Osborne gloomily noted in his journal in 1973. Barely more than 15 years after Look
Back in Anger, aged 42, he was out in the cold, the party over. Such is the fate that can await a middle-aged playwright: you may have something to say but will anyone fight for your voice to be heard?
Set in the aftermath of a housewarming party, and consisting simply of a 100-minute conversation between the hostess and one of the guests, a lot hangs on every word of David Eldridge’s new play Beginning, which at a stroke propels this superb, subtle but rather undersung playwright, now 44, back into the premier league. Like others of his generation who galvanised the theatre scene in the Nineties – Martin Mcdonagh and Jez Butterworth among them – there have been lulls in visibility over the years, but those years have deepened and enriched his talent.
Both the characters – Laura, whose north London (Crouch End) flat we’re in, and Danny, who’s from East London (near to Eldridge’s hometown of Romford) – are at an awkward age. She’s 38, single, childless, with no immediate family left; he’s 42, divorced, hasn’t seen his daughter in ages, is back living with his mother.
Just how much of Eldridge’s own life-experience has been channelled into what must rank as one of the funniest, most touching, and at times most enthralling/excruciating seduction scenes you’ll ever see on stage is open to idle speculation. It doesn’t seem fanciful, though, to infer that the sheer attention to detail in the dialogue, the craft of it, stems from the anxiety that a writer in his shoes faces: the apprenticeship years are over, the stakes are high, the clock is ticking.
If it sounds like I’m stinting on specifics, that’s partly intentional. I’d love people to discover the play like an unfolding surprise. And I’m not sure, either, that a review can do justice to the nuance and subtext that its meticulous director Polly Findlay coaxes from her first-class actors, Justine Mitchell and Sam Troughton.
Eldridge prefaces his playscript with a quote from Joseph Conrad, “Who knows what true loneliness is?”, and the play’s success is to reveal, even in the throwaway loose-change of woozy, would-be breezy smalltalk, the well of solitude down which the almost-incompatible pair are falling – desperately reaching out for
‘The evening dares to show the way men, as well as women, can fall short of the roles foisted on them’
companionship but flinching too, afraid of rejection, of making the hurt worse.
“I hate Sunday on my own,” Laura says simply, and the way that Mitchell seems to blink back tears suggests that if Danny calls an Uber and beats a retreat she’s going to hit break-point; a successful business-woman buckling inside. For his part, the tense, physical gaucheness that Troughton brings to recruitment consultant Danny – who keeps putting his foot it in with his lad banter – attests to his emotional paralysis. As he darts around the sitting-room, in a frenzy of clearing-up, a rude shying-away from the romantic task at hand, you register the hurt in Mitchell’s face, but also a deep empathy. The evening dares to show the way men, as well as women, can fall short of the roles foisted on them; are confused too by modern mores; furthermore, it ventures to ask whether genuine passion can sit side by side with naked calculation. She wants a child. He’s a family man…
There may be some who think the play goes implausibly far given the tight time-constraint but I found it all too piercingly believable.
In its wisdom and humour (as well as the particular delight of a moment where the couple dance, or rather fail to get their groove on) the piece called to mind a youthful Eldridge hit of 17 years ago – Under the Blue Sky, directed at the Royal Court by one Rufus Norris – which later made its way into the West End. This should do, too. It’s a beaut, end of.
Until Nov 14. Tickets: 020 7452 3000; nationaltheatre.org.uk